by Kage Baker
The women came last. The well-born ones were skirted in deerskin, the poor ones in woven plant fiber, and all carried their lives on their backs. Some few carried infants. Some others wore a little money of their own. There were my groupie cuties, Puluy and Awhay, carefully dressed for the occasion, thrilled to trade the past for a new scene. There was the artist Skilmoy, angry about something again, and there was Anucwa, sagely giving her advice on what to do about it. Behind them they were leaving a hundred tasks undone for all time. Raven, farewell, they sang.
Get a good look at them all, because they’re going away forever.
They stopped singing when we came in sight of the ships, and some of them stopped in their tracks. There was the holoproduced vision of the Rainbow Bridge, arching above the transport pad, its other end vanishing into a golden cloud far out over the sea. Some of my Chumash looked scared, but the security teams closed right in to push them along.
“Look!” I barked, prancing, frisking in circles. “Look at the lovely ships! Not only does each and every one have its own latrine, but we’ll all get delicious food and drink on board, served by beautiful Sky Ladies who will wait on you with smiles. I can hardly wait, can you? Come on!”
So I led them at last to the transport pad, where the ships sat like silver ducks. Here were the anthropologists, out to meet us with open arms. Green arms with goose pimples, but open anyway.
“Look, spirits, I have brought my nieces and nephews for a ride in the Sky Canoes!” I saluted them.
“Welcome, Children of Coyote!” they cried. But the people hung back, staring up at the gleaming ships.
“They don’t look like canoes,” ventured Sepawit. “They look like that flying tube the War Helmet Nunasis had.” He meant the Martian from our latest matinee. “Are you sure they’re safe?”
“Of course they’re safe! I’m going with you myself, aren’t I? Would I ride in them if they weren’t safe? You’ve all heard stories about what a coward I am.” Inspiration hit me. “And, you know what else? There’s heating inside those canoes.”
This brought a look of longing to many faces, including the anthropologists’. Nutku pushed through the line.
“Well, I’m through freezing. I want to see what it’s like inside one of those things,” he said. That got them moving, because of course his fellow kantap members had to come too or lose status, and naturally the priests and shamans couldn’t appear afraid, so they pushed forward up the boarding ramps, and as the leaders went, so went the townsfolk.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Backing around the side of a ship to get out of the wind, I bumped into someone. A cup of something hot was pressed into my paw. I gulped gratefully. Black coffee laced with aguardiente, wow.
“Swell!” I gasped, handing the cup back to Mendoza. “Burns all the way down. Say, what are you doing up here?”
“Turning to ice, same as everybody else. Came up to watch the end of it all.” She had the hood of her cloak pulled so tight about her face, she looked like a nun.
“No, no, it’s a new beginning!” I cried cheerily, overcompensating because it didn’t feel like one. “The good people of Humashup are out, they’re filing up the ramps, my bags are already packed and on board, and I know for a fact that the commissary at Mackenzie Base serves great food. Little Joseph is a happy Sky Coyote!”
Right on cue, it came into our line of sight, a canoe negotiating the surf and boulders below us to strike out into the open sea.
“One of your Indians appears to have changed his mind,” observed Mendoza delicately.
It was Kenemekme, the poor dope. He was leaning way forward, inexpertly paddling a dugout he must have made himself, it was so crudely chiseled out of drift log. He was naked. All he had with him besides the paddle were flowers. Some kind of yellow flowers, he’d picked hundreds of them, they filled his canoe and hung over the sides, and a few bobbed yellow in his wake, floating in the sea foam. My muzzle hung open in astonishment.
“Coreopsis gigantea, Eschscholzia californica, and—let’s see, that’s Oenothera hookerii,” Mendoza said, peering at him, shading her eyes with her hand. “He must have been up all night gathering those. Shouldn’t you be raising some kind of alarm or something?”
On one particularly enthusiastic backswing he noticed us, and stood up to wave. The canoe nearly capsized, but he steadied it somehow and gave us a crazy smile. He was shouting something. Mortals couldn’t have heard him through the distance and the wind and surf, but we received him clear as anything.
“Uncle Sky Coyote! I’ll meet You there! Don’t worry, I know the way! But the beauty is shining out there, shining and shining beyond the world, can’t You see it? I have to go find out what it is!” he cried. Then he plopped himself back into his canoe and went paddling on out to sea.
“If I remember Company policy correctly,” Mendoza continued, watching me, “you’re supposed to sound an alarm so the security teams can decide whether they’ll go with option one, which is to rush out there and recover the escapee, or with the never-talked-about option two, which is to have a sharpshooter pick him off and thereby eliminate any loose talk or loose ends.”
“I think I’m going to make an executive decision,” I found myself saying. “I think I’m going to let that one get away.”
“But heavens, whatever shall we do? He is already in the catalogue. Ah, but we’ve taken samples of what matters of him, so I suppose that doesn’t pose a problem after all. Perhaps you think he won’t survive to tell anyone about us, in that wretchedly un-seaworthy boat? You may be right. I estimate his chances of not drowning in the next three hours at seven hundred and fifteen to one. Though if the prevailing winds let up, he may have a better chance, and might make it to one of those islands out there in the channel. On the other hand, some of those islands are inhabited by worshipers of Chinigchinix, who are, as I understand, religious fanatics. If he lands on the wrong island, babbling about visions he received from Coyote, he’ll be killed as a heretic. Though if he lands on the right island, he might be hailed as a new prophet and tell all kinds of tales we don’t want him to tell. What does a Company man do in a situation like this, I wonder?” She watched me, coldly amused.
I yawned a wide coyote yawn. I shrugged.
“Hey, he won’t last an hour in that thing.”
“And if you send out an emergency team to pick him up, it’ll delay takeoff. Sound decision, I guess …”
“I think so. Anyhow, you know what I always say? In a hundred years, who’s gonna care?”
She was still laughing at that as I took back the coffee and had another hit. “Mm, good. Whoops—there go the boarding lights. Time for me to beat it. Well, Mendoza, it’s been truly great working with you again after all these years. Keep in touch, okay? Vaya con Dios.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I WAS KEPT BUSY IN the next few minutes explaining to the sixty-five Chumash on our ship just how safe things were. When I was finally able to buckle myself into a seat and look out a window, I saw the base personnel assembled to watch the takeoff. There was Bugleg, eyes streaming with tears from the cold air and the pollen count, looking on unhappily as Lopez gave firm orders. Only the brass and the specialists were there, of course; all the techs were busy packing up equipment or dismantling the modular dome. Nobody was staying a second longer than was necessary, except for Mendoza. She was still standing there sipping her coffee, but she was staring away, fascinated, at the wild mountains of the interior. She looked up and raised her cup in a farewell gesture as the ship began to rise. I felt the climb speed up, and she seemed to sink into the earth as California dropped away below us. And there, quite a ways out to sea, I saw Kenemekme still bobbing along in his canoe full of flowers.
It really would have been more trouble than it was worth to go after him. Would he really have been happy at Mackenzie Base? He had his quest to find the beauty that was shining beyond the world, and he was sure to enjoy it more than orientation seminars and learning to dri
ve loaders. The plain daylight around him was probably the closest he’d ever come to his mystical goal, but maybe he wouldn’t live long enough to realize that.
Though I once knew a lady of a metaphysical turn of mind who’d have argued that the plain daylight is the mystical goal, that God or whatever, being everywhere, is the ordinary world all around us, and our quest is not to arrive where He is but to notice Him right in front of our faces. If she was correct, Kenemekme wouldn’t be disappointed. She died a long time ago, though, so I couldn’t debate the point.
But it made me feel good to see him paddling along happily into the unknown. One little bit of Humashup was being left behind, one tiny fragment of the lost world, and maybe something good would come of it. Sort of like Pandora’s box, you know? Shut in there with all the evils and sorrows of the world was Hope. The rest of the people were being taken away to a bright future, and Kenemekme was being left in the dark, but maybe he’d brighten up the darkness a little while with his songs, with his crazy dances.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
THE REST OF THE STORY’S pretty funny. Want to hear?
The people of Humashup did just fine at Mackenzie Base. Massive culture shock at first, of course, but they picked up on the delights of technology right away. More cartoon matinees! Food you didn’t have to pound on a rock! Toilet paper! Not to mention lifetime jobs with the Company doing things like cleaning fuel tanks and working in processing plants. Menial work, but they were unskilled, after all, and it paid well. Great medical benefits, too. Most of them lived to see a third century.
They weren’t allowed to breed anymore, of course, but that was okay with them, because most of them felt that parenting was a real pain in the ass. They happily donated sperm and ova to the Company freezebanks and let the anthropologists continue to pick their brains, though of course the longer they were exposed to a foreign culture, the less accurate their memories were about their old ways. They lived out long and comfortable lives eating Company food, buying Company merchandise, and vacationing at Company resorts.
Did I mention that Nutku and his fellow kantap members went into business? Their shell money was traded for Company scrip as soon as they figured out the exchange rate, and with it they bought the plant that manufactured the BeadBucks used at Company resorts for minor purchases like cocktails, appetizers, and beach-chair rentals. They parleyed that into a number of Authentic Chumash(tm) handicraft stands at Company bases all over the globe. Sepawit’s kid grew up to become one of their CEOs, in fact, an executive with amazing vision. Numbers of ladies like Skilmoy supplemented their paychecks by producing Authentic Chumash(tm) baskets and other stuff in their spare time, which they had more of, now that they didn’t have babies every year, and eventually banked enough to open their own, competing line. There was a real trade war that went on for years. Eventually they all died of old age, rich, and that was the end of them.
A long, long time later, the Chumash nation was reborn. Not the real Chumash, of course; the ones we left behind had long since died of smallpox or interbred with their invaders to the point that they ceased to exist as a culture, except for one determined tribe that ran a gambling casino somewhere.
No, the New Chumash were mostly Caucasian members of a religious group in the Federal Republic of Santa Barbara. Their spiritual leader had this vision that declared that he and all his followers were reincarnated Chumash. They believed the Chumash had spent all their time swimming with dolphins and getting energy out of quartz crystals. Nobody thought to ask the casino owners whether or not this was true, because running a casino didn’t seem a very spiritual thing to be doing.
So the New Chumash bought up all this land north of the republic (pretty close to where Humashup had been, as a matter of fact) and declared it an ecological preserve and spiritual sanctuary. They were able to do this, despite the astronomical price of real estate in California, because they were stinking rich, being a very successful religious movement. The Reformed Church of Chinigchinix, by this time a toothless and benign old faith, gave its blessing to these fellow Native Americans by adoption.
And they had a lot of healing seminars and ate a lot of whole-grain carbohydrates on the sacred ground, but most of them felt that something was missing. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the sacred ground, like most of California after half a millennium of overdevelopment, was so chemically poisoned it looked like the back of the moon. All the whole-grain carbohydrates and the woven baskets they were served in had to be imported from Nigeria. Anyway, the reincarnated Chumash weren’t quite happy.
It chanced that one of them, being a stockbroker, was at a dinner party with a lot of other rich and powerful people. There she met a friend of a friend who had connections with Dr. Zeus. She did a lot of wistful talking over her nonalcoholic Chardonnay; so did her money. One thing led to another, and within two weeks the New Life Chumash Nation had placed its order with the Company. As the Company had known it would.
Bring the Chumash out of the past for us, they said. Give us back our traditions, our ancient ways. We want to dress up in Chumash robes. We want the total Chumash experience. Spare no expense.
And with those magic words, Dr. Zeus got to work. From their labs they got out all this Chumash genetic material that they, uh, just happened to have. They brought out all the carefully propagated flora and fauna of the Chumash ecosystem from their botanical and zoological gardens. They brought from their records every possible detail of Chumash folkways and culture, and boy, they sure had a lot of material.
The sacred ground was detoxified and bulldozed back into its original contours; it was replanted; it was restocked with animal life. Cleaning and restocking the adjacent ocean floor was harder, but, you know, they’d said to spare no expense, and who was the Company to argue? There was some outcry from historical preservationists when the picturesque old oil rigs off the coast were dismantled. Cash donations shut them up. When everything had naturalized, Humashup was rebuilt down to the last woven hut, and the New Life Chumash Nation moved in.
The next step was making more Chumash. This posed a slight problem for the New Lifers, because they were all sexually dysfunctional in one way or another. No problem, said Dr. Zeus. We’ve got genuine Chumash sperm and ova here, and they can get it on in a petri dish as well as anywhere else. The ladies of the group coped admirably with the in vitro transplants; they drank raspberry leaf tea for nine months and found childbirth a very spiritually fulfilling experience.
But they were kind of disappointed in the resulting children, who didn’t seem to share their values. And, let’s face it, life on the sacred ground under the ancient oak trees was, well, bard and smelly, and there turned out to be absolutely no psychic contacts with dolphins. The tribe running the casino could have told them that, if anyone had bothered to ask them.
Eventually most of the New Chumash got tired of it and went off to be the other people they’d been in their past lives. Dr. Zeus got custody of the Chumash children, and the children inherited the ecological preserve. They had to be taught how to live on it, though, so the Company sent in all these anthropologists made up as Sky People to instruct them in their ancient culture. Including a Sky Coyote, but not me. That was some other Sky Coyote. I was somewhere else by then.
When they grew up, the Chumash took a good look at the world around them and decided they wanted out of the Stone Age. But these Chumash had been inoculated against diseases, and there were no Spaniards around to beat them up, see, so things turned out a little differently this time.
A couple of generations later, genetic descendants of Nutku were the stockbrokers drinking Chardonnay at dinner parties in Santa Barbara. They still had their language and culture intact, which helped them become the most aggressive import-export entrepreneurs on the Pacific Rim. Many of them moved down to Hollywood, where they revitalized the entertainment industry to such an extent that there were soon dark mutterings in certain quarters about the town’s being run by Indians.
They did have a problem with juvenile delinquency, however. Chumash gangs became the latest scourge of the venerable Republic of Mission Revival. The same intact culture that made them good businessmen also made many of them lousy parents …
But it was their culture, and at least they got it back, which is more than some people get. And, all things considered, they’re doing okay. You should see how the Etruscans Nouveaux turned out!
Happy endings aren’t so easy to come by when you’re an immortal, because nothing ever quite seems to end. Well, things do; we don’t, which is part of the problem.
New World One Base was closed down, right on schedule before the century ended. Deliberately ruined and abandoned to the jungle, leaving not a rack behind for Colonel Churchward or any of those guys to find. Houbert had decamped by then, with an entourage that included his few surviving Mayans. His next paradise was a chateau on the Loire, where I understand the Mayans refined the science of haute cuisine to an art before they, too,eventually died. Houbert was moved on to Monaco—it’s one of those places the Company practically invented—and created another little celestial world on the Riviera. As far as I know, he’s still there at the safe house, dispensing his own special syrupy wisdom to adoring mortal servants and unlucky subordinates.
Latif grew up into a superbly competent executive administrator, all brass and flash and hardball, and got the shock of his young life when he finally pushed through his assignment to North Africa and was reunited with his hero Suleyman. It took him a while to realize that sly, courteous old Suleyman was also a superbly competent executive administrator, and actually knew a few tricks Latif didn’t. Eventually the student settled down at the feet of the master, and the two of them became legends in that part of the world.